Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [12]
It soon became apparent that the boys were primed for some heavy petting. Mary was not at all interested in John, and Barbara was proving resistant up front. John persuaded his ex-love Barbara to switch, and Mary found herself in front with a passionate and persuasive Bob. She resisted him, but her lips hurt for a week from his ardent kisses.
Bob showed up at her doorstep the next night, and the night after. They began dating intensely. To Mary, Bob seemed worldly, yet kindly and considerate. She felt safe with him, in spite of his passionate advances.
If Mary’s childhood had been less than idyllic, it was heaven compared with Bob’s. He was the son of a blue-collar worker, Robert Sr., and Blanche, a frail, quiet young woman. At the age of nineteen, six months after giving birth to Bob, Blanche Griffith died of an internal infection caused by remnants of the afterbirth, which a careless doctor had failed to remove. (For years Bob had the vague sense that he was somehow responsible for his mother’s demise.) Her death left Bob at the mercy of his hot-tempered father. Robert Griffith was a lout, subject to bouts of unpredictable anger and violence. Bob learned to anticipate beatings regularly and for no logical reason. At least once his father locked him in a closet for hours. Robert Sr. had even once knocked his infant son out of a high chair in a burst of anger.
Bob feared and hated his father. Robert would disappear for long periods, leaving his son with his maternal grandparents, who treated him well but without much warmth. But Robert would turn up regularly, continuing to terrorize his young son, who anticipated these arrivals with purest dread. Miserable, with no one to confide in, Bob turned inward. He learned to think through his own problems, and to choose solutions with a minimum of communication. He read a lot, skipping school and dropping out in the tenth grade. He turned a defensive shield to the world, telegraphing a shy, taciturn nature. Inside, strong opinions and emotions boiled.
Hungry for emotional bonding, he turned to the streets of his rough neighborhood in Oakland and a mixed-race crowd of friends who lived on the edge. To overcome a legacy of physical fear Bob flung himself into street brawling and other more dangerous peer rituals. One day the gang decided to burglarize the store of a Chinese merchant who dealt numbers, hoping for a big haul. They were immediately caught, and Bob was packed off to reform school for a year.
He emerged determined never to foul his life that way again. Soon after, he met Mary. To her, Bob seemed self-confident and courageous, things she felt she wasn’t. He was mature, a man of the world, not one to be manipulated by anyone. Slender, blue eyed, with rugged good looks, Bob could thank his Scottish heritage for his air of understated charm. He was not equally stricken, but he felt at ease with Mary, and she was comfortable with him. Mary’s obvious neediness and lack of self-assurance appealed to his masculine, protective side. And even though Ophelia opposed the match, Bob was at first highly impressed with the Harrisons, who, at least externally, seemed to be a large, happy, normal family—something he had never enjoyed.
Before long, Bob and Mary launched into an affair. Mary graduated from Oakland High School with barely passing grades (the only book she read through to the end was Rebecca) and took a twenty-dollar-a-week job as an elevator operator at Capwell’s department store in Oakland. She moved from home to a rented room in a hotel in Oakland, where Bob covertly spent many nights.